This is how the Murdoch companies work. They see political advantage for the Right in distorting and corrupting legitimate investigations and exploiting real tragedies to do this. In this case it appears the goal was to discredit the investigations into Trump collusion with the Russians.

While Trump complains that our legitimate news media fabricates “fake news” the real fake news industry is based at FoxNews and appears to be working under the close direction of this White House.

A free society with a functioning democracy relies on the existence of a vigorous and honest press to guarantee the public has good information, that the public can trust its information, that the public can trust they are not being tricked or deceived.

But in Trump World honest news is the enemy. They have created what Orwell warned us about: a dictatorship of lies, in which the Truth is called a lie and the regime’s own self-manufactured Big Lies are fed to the public as gospel.

The Murdoch media and the Trump White House see news media as a political tool and a political weapon, divorced from truth and reality. Because truth and reality endanger the Trump regime. Because truth and reality undermine their power.

Because the Trump regime holds this cynical belief they think everyone else does too, that their opponents are just as cynical and dishonest. They cheat because they believe everyone cheats. They lie because they believe everyone lies. Of course every story that embarrasses Trump or the Republicans must be a lie.

Remember, FoxNews was originally dreamed up in the Nixon White House, the brainchild of Roger Ailes, then a Nixon staffer. Dishonest beginnings.

Ailes wanted to call it GOP-TV: a news source where everything was Republican spin and every story was a Republican weapon. When Rupert Murdoch learned about it he loved it. He put it together in the mid-90s as FoxNews and put Ailes in charge. The goal: to discredit and destroy the Clintons and the Clinton presidency.

There is a clear pattern here. The Seth Rich murder conspiracy theory resembles the fixation about Benghazi but ultimately harks back to the never-ending tabloid accusations that the Clintons had murdered their close friend and White House staffer Vince Foster. The story was pushed for years, not in the form of actual facts but with Fox personalities asking leading questions about Vince Foster’s death, substantiating the unfounded speculation, not with any evidence, but by raising their eyebrows and nodding. This was also the method used to charge and prosecute Hillary Clinton in the media for the “murder" of ambassador Chris Stevens. FoxNews kept the false narrative alive and Trey Gowdy and Darryl Issa’s inquisition in Congress kept the viewers glued to FoxNews. This is how the Murdoch press operates, carefully coordinated with the right wing faction in Washington. A poisonous symbiotic relationship.

Meanwhile innocent people are incriminated unfairly and grieving families are victimized.